Saturday, September 14, 2013

Calling Down Fire (part 3)

Yes, the messengers that had been
charged with their task by Jesus Himself, were to go out and preach the
Gospel. The coming of the kingdom of God to earth, with all that this
implied for the overlap of the realm of the Creator God and the realm of the
divine image-bearers, meant the arrival of the Messiah. What it meant was
that the long night of exile in their own land and foreign oppression was
coming to an end. This was portended by
the healing of the sick. Together with this, the declaration that the
kingdom of God was at hand meant that the Lord was at work, redeeming His
people.

This was to be the sum and
substance of the message and activity of those sent by Jesus. Though these
that Jesus then sent out were instructed to limit their ministry to the house
of Israel, these instructions do indeed sound very much like those which are
reported at the end of Matthew, where Jesus says “Therefore go and make
disciples of all nations” (28:19a). This
making of disciples would include informing all nations about the kingdom of the
Creator God that had come to earth in and through Jesus’ death and
Resurrection, and that “all authority in heaven and earth” (28:18b) had been
given to Him.

Then and now, this message---the
Gospel message---was a message of power, somehow carrying the Creator God’s
power to accomplish His missional purposes for His world and His people in this
world, with the mission carried out through His people. It would seem
that such is what the Apostle Paul believed, and to that end he wrote what are
regarded to be some of the most beautiful words ever penned, making the
declaration that the Gospel “is God’s power for salvation to everyone who
believes” (Romans 1:16b). Jesus’ demand that this message of the kingdom
be preached, along with the appropriate response to the response of those that
hear and possibly reject the message, stands up as a daily challenge as to
whether or not presumptive believers truly believe in the message and in the
power inherent within it.

As these things are considered, it
is incumbent upon those that claim allegiance to Jesus to always, always,
always historically contextualize Jesus’ words and actions as presented in the
Gospels so that they may be better understood and applied by those that do
indeed wish to live by them. In that time, people will have seen actions
such as these and heard words not completely unlike those of Jesus.
Neither the mode of preaching nor the message was entirely new, either in the
Israel of Jesus’ day or in the world into which His disciples would later
travel. One can ascertain that the method of preaching was not new,
because Jesus is said to have provided directives that were designed to insure
that His disciples looked different from all of the other traveling
preachers---thus the restriction on the bags and sandals and greetings, along with
His insistence that they not move around from house to house.

The cultural familiarity with the
practice that Jesus’ disciples were to undertake probably has a hand in the
Apostle Paul referring to the foolish method of spreading the Gospel of the
kingdom of the covenant God of Israel that had been established in Jesus (and
this completely apart from the apparent foolishness of the message of a
crucified and resurrected man being the Lord of all, rather than the Caesar
that was ultimately responsible for the state-sanctioned execution). It
is to be understood that the Creator God did not ordain a new practice that
would somehow make it easier to preach the message of the Gospel of
Christ. He did not give a new tool that would make the Gospel’s gaining
of attention a much more simple task. Mysteriously, the Creator God took
something familiar and imbued it with the confounding power of the
Resurrection.